The Man Who Lost the Sea (35 page)

The direct question startled Smith; he had been about to interrupt, and was only half following what the big man said. He made a weak uncertain laugh, very like that of Sir Laurence in the Graveyard Scene, and said, “Sure. Sure I do.”

He stood back while Noat turned the chair upright, set it on the counter and measured the missing spoke with an ancient and frayed dressmaker’s tape. “You got to make allowances,” Noat said to the tape. “This old thing’s stretched, but you see I know just how much it’s stretched. 14 inches here is 14 and 17/32nds actual. That’s one way to make allowances. Then,” he went on, laying the tape against a piece of square stock that was chucked in a highly individual wood lathe, “if the tape says 14 on the chair, and I mark it the same 14 on the lumber, it comes out right and it makes no never mind what it is actual. People,” he said, rounding at last on Smith, who prepared himself for some profound truth, “fret too much.”

Smith lived for a moment with that feeling one has when mounting ten steps in the dark, then discovers there are only nine stairs. He grasped wildly at what he thought the man had been talking about. “People are all right. I mean, I like people.”

Noat considered this, or a turning chisel he had obviously made from an old screwdriver, carefully. Smith could not stand the contemplative silence, and ran on. “Why, I do everything for people.
I join every club or lodge in town that does any good for people, and I work hard at it. I guess I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t like people.”

“You don’t do that for yourself.” It was, if a statement, agreement and a compliment; if a question, a searching, even embarrassing one, calling for more insight than Smith had or dared to have. It was voiced as a statement, but so nearly as a question that Smith could not be sure. He was, however, too honest a person to grasp at the compliment … and if he rejected it, he must be embarrassed, even insulted, and walk out … but he couldn’t walk out until he—“You know my wife, don’t you?”

“Sure do. A very nice little lady.”

He started the lathe. It made a very strange sound. The power looked like that from an ancient upright vacuum cleaner. Reduction was accomplished through gears that could only have come from one of those hand-operated coffee mills that used, with their great urn-shaped hoppers and scroll-spoked, cast-iron scarlet flywheels, to grace chain markets before they became supered. The frame was that of a treadle-operated sewing machine, complete with treadle, which, never having been disconnected, now disappeared in a blur of oscillation that transferred itself gently to everything in the place. One could not see it, but it was there in the soles of the feet, in the microscopic erection of the fibers in a dusty feather boa, in the way sun-captured dust motes marched instead of wandered. The lathe’s spur-center seemed to have been the business end of a planing attachment from some forgotten drill press; it was chucked into a collet that seemed to have been handmade out of rock maple. The cup center, at the other end, turned freely and true in what could be nothing else but a roller-skate wheel. Noat set his ground-down screwdriver on the long tool rest, which was of a size and massiveness that bespoke a history of angle-bracketship aboard a hay wagon. On the white wood a whiter line appeared, and a blizzard of fragrant dust appeared over Noat’s heavy wrists. He carried the tool along the rest, and the whiter-upon-white became a band, a sheet. When he had taken it from end to end, he stopped the machine. The wood was still square, but with all its corners rounded. Smith tore his fascinated eyes away from it and asked, wondering if Noat would
still know what he was talking about, “How did you happen to know her?”

“Customer.”

“Really?”

Noat squinted at the display window over the edge of his chisel. “Garlic press,” he said, and pursed his lips. “Swedish cookie mold, by golly, she was here seven times over that. Little lady really gets two bits out of each two dozen pennies.” He laughed quietly; he had a good laugh. Smith’s solar plexus contained a sudden vacuum at the mention of these homey, Eloise-y things. “And the egg separators—two hundred egg separators.”

“
What?
I never saw—”

“Yes, you did. You went away to some kind of convention, and when you came back she’d done over the breakfast nook.”

“The textured wall!”

“Yeah, those mash-paper cushions they put between layers in an egg crate. She cut and fit and put ’em up and painted ’em—what she say?” He closed his eyes. “Flat purple with dull gold in the middle of each cup.”

“She never told me,” Smith informed himself aloud. “She said she’d … Well, I guess she didn’t actually
say
. But I got the idea she saved up from the house money and had it done. She really did it herself?”

Noat nodded gravely.

“I wonder why she didn’t tell me,” Smith breathed.

“Maybe,” said George Noat, “she thought you might live with a textured wall where you wouldn’t with egg separators.”

There was a meaning here that he could not—would not—see, but that he knew would come to him most distastefully later. He compressed his lips. He had acquired too many things to think about in the last few minutes, and at least two of them might be insults. He glanced doorward, and said in farewell tones, “Well, I—” and then the handle of the chisel pressed into his palm stopped him. “You go on with that. I got to cook some glue.”

Smith stared with horror at the chisel. “Me run that machine? I never in my life—”

The giant cupped a hand under his left armpit and propelled him to the machine. “The one wonderful thing about a lathe, you couldn’t tell a beginner’s first job from Chippendale’s last one. Don’t ever get all big-eyed over beautiful work—chances are it was real easy to do. What I always say is, a Duncan Phyfe is only a piccoloful of whiskey.”

“But—but—”

“Pull this chain, starts it. Rest your chisel here, cut light and slow at first. Anytime you want to see what you’ve done or feel it, pull the chain again, it stops. That’s all there is.” He started the machine, took the chisel, and, under its traveling point, the wood drew on a new garment of texture from end to end.

Timidly, Smith took back the chisel and nervously approached the spinning wood. It touched, and he sprang back, but there was a new neat ring around it. Fascinated, he tried it again, and again, and then looked up to ask if that was right: but Noat had confidently retired to the other end of the shop, where a disgraceful-looking glue pot sat upon a gas ring.

Nothing could have given him more assurance than to be trusted with the job like this. For a while, then, he entered the magical, never-quite-to-be-duplicated region of The First Time. You may challenge the world to find anyone who runs a lathe and who also forgets the first cut he ever made.

Disappointingly soon, the square wood was round; but then he realized joyfully that this would be a new spoke for the chair, and must come down quite a bit more. He worked steadily and carefully, until at last his mind was able to watch it while it thought of other things as well—and it thought of Eloise, thought of Eloise in a way unknown to it for oh … oh, a long time; and for such a brief while, too—there was something deeply sad about that. The day—no, two days—before he had stumblingly asked her to marry him, he had been in a drugstore, just like any other drugstore except for the climactic fact that it was in her neighborhood, the one she always went to,
her
drugstore. He had walked in to get some cough drops and had suddenly realized this incredible thing about the place—that she had many times stood here, had bent over that showcase, had had that prim warm little body cupped there by the padded swivel
seats at the soda fountain. She had smiled in this place. Her voice had vibrated the sliding glass over the vitamins, and her little feet must have lightly dotted the floor, from time to time, just after it had been waxed.

And so it was with the Anything Shoppe; her hand had danced the spring-dangling doorbell, and she had bargained here and made plans, and counted money and held it for a moment, while the three fine “thinking” furrows—two long and one short—came between her eyebrows, and went quickly, leaving no mark. She had smiled in this place, and perhaps laughed; and here she had thought of him.

Textured wall.

The turning wood had grown silky, and now seemed to be growing a sheath of mist … he withdrew the tool and stood watching it through the blur until a bulky rectangular object on the tool rest distracted him. He blinked, and saw it was a box of tissues. Gratefully he reached for one and blew his nose and wiped his eyes. He gazed guiltily at Noat, but the big man’s back was turned and he appeared to be totally absorbed in stirring his stinking glue. Let’s not think about how he put the tissues there, or why … turn off the machine now.

George Noat found it not necessary to turn to him until he spoke: “Getting a cold, I guess … snff … time of year. Mr. Noat, have a look at this now.”

Noat lumbered back to the lathe and ran his hand along the piece. His hands were those a prep-school boy might see from the windows of the school bus, that a collegian with a school letter on the front of his sweater might see manipulating the mysteries under a car. One seldom noticed the skill of such hands, but ingrained black was dirt and dirt was, vaguely, “them,” not “us.” The idea does cling, oh yes it does, ingrained, too. Yet for all his distress in this moment, Smith was able to notice how the great grainy leather-brown hand closed all around the stainless new wood, was intimate with it from end to end, left not a mark. To Smith it was an illumination, to see such a hand live so with purity. All this subliminal; still before his stinging eyes was the mist of hurting, and he said aloud, “She left me.”

“That’s just
fine
,” said George Noat. He must have meant one thing or the other—probably he meant … for he was taking up the red chair. He lifted it high and hung it casually on the handle of a scythe, which, in turn, hung to the beam overhead. An unbroken rung of the chair thereby lay at his eye level. He started the lathe, and with four sure sweeps and five confident pauses, he duplicated the unbroken rung complete to its dowelled ends. He stopped the machine, slapped away collet and tailstock and tried the new rung for size. Freehand, with a keyhole saw, he cut away excess at the tips. It fitted. He took it to the glue pot, dipped the ends, returned and set it in place; then, with simultaneous blows right and left, he drove it home. A war surplus quartermaster’s canvas belt plus a suitcase clasp of the over-center type formed a clamp for it. He left it where it hung, and in his strange way—he seemed never to move quickly, but all the same, could loom up over a man in a rush—he rounded on Smith. “You want her back?”

“Oh God,” said Jody Smith softly, “I do.”

“Hmp.” Noat moved to the other end of the counter and gingerly capped the hot glue pot. “You need her,” Smith thought he said.

Smith frowned. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Nope.”

Jody Smith’s quick petulance evaporated as quickly as it had formed; again he found himself fumbling for whatever it was this creature seemed to mean, or almost meant. “I said I want her back.”

“I know. You didn’t say you need her.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“No, it ain’t.”

Half angry, half amused, Smith said, “Oh come on, now. Who’d split hairs about a thing like that?”

“Some people might.” He paused, looking at a piece of junk he pulled from a box. “Gorwing, he would.”

“Gorwing, he won’t,” said Smith with some asperity. “Look, I don’t want this talked all over with the likes of that Gorwing.”

Noat gave a peculiar chuckle. “Gorwing wouldn’t talk about it. He’d just
know
.”

“I don’t get you. He’d just—know? Know what?”

“If you should want something. Or need it.”

Smith wagged his head helplessly. “I never know when you’re kidding.”

“This thing,” said Noat soberly, staring at the object in his hand—it seemed to be the ring-shaped, calibrated “card” from a marine compass—“got three hundred and sixty degrees on it. More than any college graduate in the country.” Without moving anything but his eyes, he regarded Smith. “Am I kidding?”

In spite of himself, Smith felt moved to laughter. “I don’t know.” Sobering then, and anxious, “Have you any idea where she might have—”

“I really couldn’t say,” interjected the proprietor. “Here’s Gorwing.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Smith muttered.

Gorwing banged in, stopped, stared at Smith. He passed his hand over his eyes and muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

Then both men turned to Noat, redly regarding his sudden burst of merriment.

“You settin’ on a feather?” rasped Gorwing.

“Just listening to the echoes,” answered Noat, grinning. Then a quick concern enveloped his features. He leaned forward and watched Gorwing bend his head, gingerly touch the back of his neck. “What is it—him?”

“Him?”
Gorwing glanced insultingly at Smith. “Him, too, you might say. You doing anything?”

“What do you want?” asked Noat.

“Let’s take a ride.”

Noat, too, glanced at Smith, but not with insult. “Sure,” he said. “Go on out to the car. Be with you soon’s I … got something to finish.”

Gorwing glanced inimically at Smith again. “Don’t waste no time, now,” he said, and slung out.

Smith made a relieved and disgusted sighing sound like
zhe-e-e-e!
and shrugged like shuddering. Noat came around the counter and stood close, as if his proximity could add a special urgency to what
he had to say. “Mister Smith, you want to see your wife again? You want her to come back?”

“I told you—”

“I believe you, especially now. Some other time we’ll talk about it all you want. Now if you want to get her back, you go with Gorwing, hear? You drive him where he wants to go.”

“
Me?
Not on your life! I want no part of it, and I bet neither does he.”

“You just tell him, it’s with you or not at all; you tell him I said so.”

“Look, I think—”

“Please, Mister Smith, don’t think; not now—there isn’t time. Just get out there.”